Quotes About English

I wasn't happy with Tagore's own translations in English. Maybe he was, but I wasn't, so I took it upon myself to do it.

I read the Bible to myself; I'll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

A translation needs to read convincingly. There's no limit to what can go into it in terms of background research, feeling, or your own interests in form and history. But what should come out is something that reads as convincing English-language text.

Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.

I thought that strange syntax was the language of story books. I didn't realize those were poor translations... English from Edwardian times.

George looked doubtful, as he frequently did. English discretion, Poirot had observed, had an outward appearance that suggested doubt. Many of the politest English men and women he had met over the years looked as if they had been ordered to disbelieve everything that was said to them.

The food at Pleasant's was almost as good as the coffee. Indeed, when he considered the two together, Poirot found it hard to believe what he knew to be the case: that everybody who worked in the kitchen here was English. Incroyable.

This is the criminal left that belongs not in a dormitory, but in a penitentiary. The criminal left is not a problem to be solved by the Department of Philosophy or the Department of Englishit is a problem for the Department of Justice. Black or white, the criminal left is interested in power. It is not interested in promoting the renewal and reforms that make democracy work; it is interested in promoting those collisions and conflict that tear democracy apart.

Trouble-strewn India was no longer a rich source of career opportunities for English graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, who for decades had taken Indian civil service exams, headed east on Peninsula & Orient steamers to make their fortunes in Bengal, and won fame fighting along India's northwest frontier.

It was the loveliest hour of the English year: seven o'clock on Midsummer Night.

Reeducation needs careful tending, like an English lawn. Even one moment of negligence, and the weeds crop up again ~ those indestructible weeds of historical truth.

Then suddenly, he was struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: that English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness!

Paraguayans have no Italian blood and are half Guarani [Indian] blood. And the Chileans call themselves "the English of South America," which actually couldn't be further from the truth.

When the English introduced the new Enfield rifle in 1857, the cartridges for the rifle came from the factory liberally coated with grease. It was necessary to bite the cartridges to release the powder. Among the sepoy regiments there was a rumor that the grease was made from pigs and cows, and thus these cartridges were a trick to defile the sepoys and make them break caste.

The almost egregiously English couple, Cedric and Rosamund Chailey, had slipped quietly away when the conversation turned to God. It had not seemed polite to be present when anything so American was being discussed.

In order for the English mind to be sharpened with tea, the Chinese mind had to be clouded with opium.

English is like music. The English language is really fit for singing. The notes match the feelings, and it makes sense.

I love the Sixties with Julie Christie and Jane Birkin - those natural English beauties. That's the look that is most me, when I wore the tight-to-the knee dresses. I don't think I bleached my hair until I was 20. I like experimenting for big occasions, though. You've always got to do a bit of a number for the birthday!

My mum gave me pretty good genes in that department. She had gorgeous skin. That good English complexion. She never seemed to have a blemish that I knew of.

I love New York, but I have to admit that I feel very English, and I do miss that sense of history that you have everywhere in Britain.

In the English language, I can love my car, or my house, or my daughter, or traveling, but in Greek and how I grew up, love is described with different words.

I love librarians more than any other people in the world. When I was an immigrant kid, they've made me feel like a human being and they gave me books that taught me English.

I've been told I have an Irish temper, I know I have Scottish thrift, and, like the English, I love a good show.

In Italian, the word for novel is romanzo, "the romance." The English is "novel" - something new. Both of those elements, experimentation and love, are fundamental to the form.